Geoffrey Chaucer, The Critical Heritage Volume 1 1385 1837

  VOLUME 1, 1385–1837

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES

  

General Editor: B.C.Southam

The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism

on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary

responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the

formation of critical attitudes to the writer’s work and its place within

a literary tradition.

The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the

history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little

published documentary material, such as letters and diaries.

Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in

order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writer’s

death.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

VOLUME 1, 1385–1837

  Edited by

  London and New York

  First Published in 1978

  

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

  Compilation, introduction, notes and index © 1978 Derek Brewer All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  ISBN 0-203-19619-8 Master e-book ISBN

  ISBN 0-203-19622-8 (Adobe eReader Format)

  ISBN 0–415–13398–X (Print Edition)

General Editor’s Preface

  

The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and near-

contemporaries is evidence of considerable value to the student of literature.

On one side we learn a great deal about the state of criticism at large and in

particular about the development of critical attitudes towards a single

writer; at the same time, through private comments in letters, journals or

marginalia, we gain an insight upon the tastes and literary thought of

individual readers of the period. Evidence of this kind helps us to

understand the writer’s historical situation, the nature of his immediate

reading-public, and his response to these pressures.

  The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage Series present a record of

this early criticism. Clearly, for many of the highly productive and lengthily

reviewed nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, there exists an

enormous body of material; and in these cases the volume editors have made

a selection of the most important views, significant for their intrinsic critical

worth or for their representative quality—perhaps even registering

incomprehension! For earlier writers, notably pre-eighteenth century, the materials are

much scarcer and the historical period has been extended, sometimes far

beyond the writer’s lifetime, in order to show the inception and growth of

critical views which were initially slow to appear.

  In each volume the documents are headed by an Introduction, discussing

the material assembled and relating the early stages of the author’s reception

to what we have come to identify as the critical tradition. The volumes will

make available much material which would otherwise be difficult of access

and it is hoped that the modern reader will be thereby helped towards an

informed understanding of the ways in which literature has been read and

judged.

  For Helena

  

Contents

  

  14 WILLIAM CAXTON , High and quick sentence, 1478, 1483, 1484

  

  15 STEPHEN SURIGO , Chaucer’s Epitaph, 1479

  

  16 JOHN PARMENTER ’ S

  Will, 1479

  

  17 WILLIAM DUNBAR , Golden eloquence, c. 1503

  

  18 STEPHEN HAWES

, Virtuous, or glad and merry, 1506

  

  19 JOHN SKELTON

, Some sad storyes, some mery, c. 1507

  20 GAVIN DOUGLAS , Venerabill Chauser, all womanis frend, 1513

  13 UNKNOWN , Word and thing, c. 1477

  

  21 WILLIAM TYNDALE , To corrupt the minds of youth, 1528

  

  22 SIR BRIAN TUKE , Poets purify the dialect of the tribe, 1531

  

  23 SIR THOMAS ELYOT , A discord, 1533

  

  24 JOHN LELAND , A life for Chaucer, c. 1540

  

  25 UNKNOWN

, Chaucer wrote much to do us good, c. 1540

  

  26 SIR THOMAS WYATT , Noble scorn, c. 1540

  

  

  INTRODUCTION

  4 JOHN LYDGATE , The Gothic poet, c. 1400–39

   BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

   THE PRINCIPAL EDITIONS OF CHAUCER ’ S

  ‘ WORKS

  ’

  1933

   Comments

  1 EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS , Great Ovid, c. 1385

  

  2 THOMAS USK , Love praises the philosophical poet, c. 1387

  

  3 JOHN GOWER , Venus sends greetings, c. 1390

  

  

  

  5 HENRY SCOGAN Moral Chaucer, c. 1407

  

  6 JOHN WALTON , Olde poysees clerk, 1410

  

  7 THOMAS HOCCLEVE , The disciple’s commemoration, 1412

  

  8 JOHN METHAM , Chaucer’s ease, 1448–9

  

  9 JOHN SHIRLEY , Gossip. Chaucer wrote for all those that be gentle of birth or of conditions, c. 1450

  

  10 GEORGE ASHBY

, Embelysshing oure englisshe, c. 1470

  

  11 ROBERT HENRYSON , Who knows if all that worthy Chaucer wrote was true?, c. 1475

  

CONTENTS

  49 SIR JOHN HARINGTON , Flat scrurrilitie, 1591

  45 GABRIEL HARVEY , Exquisite artist and curious universal scholar, c. 1585, c. 1600

  46 WILLIAM WEBBE , Profitable counsel mingled with delight, 1586

  

  47 RICHARD (?) PUTTENHAM

  , The naturall of his pleasant wit, 1589

  48 THOMAS NASHE

, Chaucer liued vnder the tirranie of

ignorance, 1589, 1952

  50 ROBERT GREENE (?), Poets wits are free, 1592

  43 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY , Chaucer had great wants, 1581

  51 FRANCIS BEAUMONT , Ancient learned men in Cambridge, 1597

  

  52 GEORGE CHAPMAN , Newe wordes, 1598

  53 THOMAS SPEGHT , In most vnlearned times being much esteemed, 1598, 1602

  VERSTEGAN , Mingler of English with French, 1605

  55 RICHARD BRATHWAIT , An excellent Epanodos, 1616

  56 HENRY PEACHAM , A delicate kernell of conceit and sweet invention, 1622

  44 JOHN HIGINS , Quaint, 1585

  28 PETER BETHAM , Plain English, 1543

  

  

  29 ROGER ASCHAM , Chaucer our English Homer, 1545, 1552, 1563

  

  30 PETER ASHTON , Chaucer’s words out of use, 1546

  31 EDMUND BECKE , The Bible versus Canterbury Tales, 1549

  32 THOMAS WILSON , The fine Courtier will talke nothyng but Chaucer, 1553

  33 ROBERT BRAHAM , Divine Chaucer lived in a barbarous age, 1555

  34 WALTER STEVINS , Wittie Chaucer, c. 1555

  41 EDMUND SPENSER , Dan Chaucer, well of English vndefiled, 1579, 1590–6, 1599 (1609)

  35 BARNABY GOOGE , Olde Ennius, 1565

  36 JOHN FOXE

, Industrious and fruitfully occupied in liberal

studies, 1570

  

  37 GEORGE GASCOIGNE , Riding Rhyme, 1575

  38 UNKNOWN , Classic and heavenly, c. 1575

  39 MEREDITH HANMER , Good decorum observed, 1576

  40 GEORGE WHETSTONE , Sir Chaucer’s jests, 1578

  42 EDWARD KIRKE , Loadestarre of our Language, 1579

CONTENTS

  83 THOMAS WARTON , The lustre and dignity of a true poet, 1774

  76 GEORGE OGLE , Dramatic Characterisation, 1739

  77 ASTROPHIL , Meer fictions for realities we take, 1740

  78 THOMAS SEWARD , Gross expressions, 1750

  79 SAMUEL JOHNSON , His diction was in general like that of his contemporaries, 1755, 1765

  80 JOSEPH WARTON , Very sudden transitions from the sublime to the ridiculous, 1756, 1782

  81 THOMAS GRAY , Circumstances alter, c. 1760

  82 RICHARD HURD , Gothic and Neoclassical, 1762

  

  75 ELIZABETH COOPER , Soaring in high Life, pleasant in low, 1737

  84 THOMAS TYRWHITT , Intelligence and satisfaction, 1775

  85 UNKNOWN , Wrote like a gentleman, 1778

  86 JOHN PINKERTON , Chaucer and the Scots, 1786

  87 WILLIAM GODWIN , Integrity and excellence of the author’s disposition, 1803

  88 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH , The lucid shafts of reason, 1805, 1822

  

  89 LORD BYRON , Obscene and contemptible, 1807

  

  57 JONATHAN SIDNAM (?), Obsolete, c. 1630

  58 BRIAN WALKER , Believed the Bible to be as true as Chaucer, 1633

  65 JOSEPH ADDISON , In vain he Jests, 1694

  

  59 EDWARD FOULIS , Time can silence Chaucer’s tongue, 1635

  60 SAMUEL PEPYS , A very fine poet, 1663, 1664

  61 THOMAS SPRAT , A close, naked, natural way, 1665

  62 SIR JOHN DENHAM , Morning Star, 1668

  63 EDWARD PHILLIPS , Facetiousness and real worth, 1675

  64 THOMAS RYMER , Will not speak of Chaucer, 1674

  66 JOHN DRYDEN , God’s plenty, 1700

  , No hyperbole, 1736

  67 ALEXANDER POPE , The pleasure of Chaucer, 1711, 1728–30

  68 JOHN HUGHES , Native Strength, 1715

  69 DANIEL DEFOE , Not fit for modest Persons to read, 1718

  70 AMBROSE PHILLIPS (?), Bright images, 1720

  71 JOHN DART and

  , Thus Chaucer painted Life, 1721, 1722

  72 LEONARD WELSTED , Obsolete and unintelligible, 1724

  73 JOHN ENTICK —

  74 THOMAS MORELL , Noble fiction, 1737

  CONTENTS

  WILLIAM BLAKE

90 , Names alter, things never, 1809

  CHARLES LAMB

91 , Comprehensiveness of genius, 1811

  GEORGE CRABBE

92 , Naked and unveiled character, 1812

  JOHN GALT

93 , Anything but poetry, 1812

  GEORGE NOTT

94 , Verses of cadence, 1815

  WILLIAM HAZLITT 95 , Chaucer attended chiefly to the real and natural, 1817, 1818

  SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

96 , Gothic Chaucer, 1818, 1834

  THOMAS CAMPBELL

97 , So strong a genius, 1819

  UNKNOWN 98 , An image of thoughtful intellectual cultivation, 1819

   UNKNOWN

  99 , An essential portion of the authentic history of his country, 1823, 1825, 1826 WILLIAM ROSCOE

  100 , Illustrating the phenomena of the moral and physical world, 1824 ROBERT SOUTHEY

  

101 , Original genius of the highest order, 1831

UNKNOWN

  102 , Chaucer became at once the poet of a people, 1837

  JOHN HIPPISLEY

103 , The mature youth of poetry, 1837

  INDEX

  

The late Dr. Johnson being asked his opinion of the expediency of Mr.

Derrick’s republishing an old book, with his usual bluntness replied,—

‘Why, Sir, if you must print, it had better be some other person’s nonsense

than your own.’ And yet, if one must print, how shall an undiscriminating

editor know what to rescue from oblivion? F.G.Waldron, Advertisement to ‘The Loves of Troilus and Cresseid

  …with a commentary by Sir Francis Kinaston’, 1796

It was Augustine, I believe, who invoked in jest or in earnest a curse on those

who had anticipated him in the utterance of his ideas….

  A.C.Swinburne, ‘Miscellanies’, 1886, p. 123

Introduction

  I The heritage of criticism of Chaucer is a body of writing unique in English literature. No other author has been commented on in English so regularly and extensively over so long a period. The literary observations and discussions threaded together by their reference to Chaucer constitute a unique index to the course of English criticism and literary theory. Some well-known critical texts take on a fresh importance when seen in connection with Chaucer, while other less-known comments reveal an unexpected significance.

  All the later major poets, and almost all distinguished English and American men of letters up to the first third of the twentieth century have made at least passing allusion to Chaucer. But it is not the purpose of the present volumes to collect such allusions, a task already superbly, though inevitably selectively, performed by Miss Spurgeon. (1) Nor is it their purpose to reprint the very many modernisations, translations and imitations made over the centuries, which imply various critical views, but views that are more explicit elsewhere and whose bulk would have required impracticably vast volumes for relatively small critical return. The aim of the present volumes is to give a copious selection, including all the significant passages, of all the ‘critical’ writings on Chaucer from his own day up to 1933. That date has been chosen, as the Introduction to Volume 2 more fully explains, as marking roughly the end of the tradition of the generally cultivated amateur critic and reader, who shared, usually unconsciously, the general tradition of Neoclassical, Romantic and Victorian premises about literature, with their social implications. This general tradition, as will sixteenth century in England and became dominant with Dryden.

  The first volume of these extracts covers the period which begins from Chaucer’s lifetime (when rhetorical principles of thinking about poetry prevailed), continues through the Neoclassical and Romantic periods (which begin towards the end of the sixteenth century), and concludes at 1837 on the brink of the Victorian period, where, however, there is no major break. The second volume covers the subsequent hundred years. The range of both volumes is thus slightly greater than that of Miss Spurgeon’s monumental work, and of a somewhat different orientation, as more fully explained in the Bibliographical Note. The aim has been to trace critical opinions and attitudes. Many extracts are necessarily the same as in Miss Spurgeon’s work, but a few references have been added, a good many have been extended, and very many have been dropped from her list in the earlier centuries, while nineteenth-century contributions have been much increased.

  II Chaucer’s genius was recognised as outstanding even in his own day. Leaving aside the probable intention of honouring him by burial in Westminster Abbey, then normally reserved for royalty, what other English author has been so heartily praised by a French contemporary (No. 1)? It is worth glancing for comparison at the reputations of Chaucer’s English contemporaries. Apart from Chaucer, only Lydgate and Gower attracted comment in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and they were often noticed mainly because of their association with Chaucer. From the seventeenth century until the middle of the twentieth Lydgate has been practically forgotten except, notably, by the poet Gray (No. 81). During the same period Gower slumbered on without being awakened even by Gray, though modern taste now places him above Lydgate and in a few respects not too far below Chaucer. Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’, widely read at the end of the fourteenth century and in the fifteenth, was for some reason not printed by Caxton, who was otherwise so assiduous to preserve late medieval English culture. ‘Piers Plowman’ was at last printed, probably for religious rather than literary reasons, in 1550, but only from the middle of the twentieth century has it been given the attention its greatness deserves. The ‘Gawain’ -poet, as great a poet as Chaucer, though very different, survived from the fourteenth century in only one small MS., was unknown till the nineteenth century, and hardly discussed till the 1950s. Chaucer alone, from his own day onwards, has been accepted as a major English poet, and, understandably though erroneously, has very often been taken as the founding father of English literature, and the first refiner of our language. His work has been present as a general, much-enjoyed, if often little understood, possession of the English literary mind, solidly ‘there’, since his own lifetime.

  III The tradition of commenting in reference to Chaucer is thus the only tradition of critical commentary in English that exists continuously from before the end of the sixteenth century, and it immediately reveals the remarkable change and innovation that began to take place around 1600 in England in the premises, expectations and theories held about literature. The change may be described as the change from Gothic to Neoclassical concepts of literature.

  We are immediately in a difficulty here, because we owe most, if not all, of our ideas about what literature is, or should be, and the very idea of literary criticism and theory itself, to Neoclassicism; more strictly, to Humanism, i.e. the study of literae humaniores, ‘the more humane writings’. In our era it was Humanism, and especially the Humanist scholars of Italy and France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who established the nature and importance of literature. (2) Almost everything that it seems natural for normal twentieth-century liberal educated Westerners to say about literature, for example that it represents ‘reality’, is ‘educative’, and in some way ‘improving’, and almost all our artistic criteria, derive specifically from Humanism. Naturally, not all Humanistic concepts were entirely original. Most were rooted in some aspect of medieval literature, in particular, medieval Latin literature, which itself was largely a product of the official ecclesiastical tradition, as well as heir to the prestige of ancient Roman literary culture. But even medieval Latin literature (in the sense of avowed verbal fictions) was not always highly thought of, especially as scholasticism became dominant from the beginning of the thirteenth century, and the vernacular was for long a poor relation of Latin. (3) One of the great achievements of literary Humanism, reflected in the course of the criticism of Chaucer, was to raise the status of the vernacular, as of literature itself—a dual achievement to which, in England, Chaucer’s own works also contributed. But the very diversity of attitudes to Chaucer’s works in the latter part of the sixteenth century reveals some of the dilemmas of Humanistic, or more conveniently named Neoclassical criticism, when confronted with a substantial body of vernacular literature composed with no regard for Neoclassical rules. The difficulty is not that Neoclassical rules were broken (though they constantly were), but that in the earlier tradition fundamental attitudes towards, and within, literature, were different. It is convenient to sum up the pre-Neoclassical attitudes as ‘rhetorical’, typical of all sorts of traditional literature, including so-called ‘oral literature’. The English segment of traditional literature which is represented by Chaucer’s work is most conveniently called English Gothic literature, by analogy with the contemporary easily recognisable Gothic style in the visual and plastic arts, and like that style extending roughly from about 1200 to about the end of the sixteenth century. (4)

  ‘Rhetoric’ is a wide and confusing term. It is partly a technical term, and largely, since about 1700, a term of abuse. (5) Like the old soldier, it’s dead but it won’t lie down. The concept and practice of rhetoric are un- avoidable in language and above all in literature but they may well be misconceived, distorted or disregarded. The history of rhetoric has been well traced in general, (6) and the criticism of Chaucer, amongst much other evidence, gives specific examples of its use or absence as a critical premise. As a technical term ‘rhetoric’ may refer to the various treatises written from Classical Antiquity onwards, which in the Middle Ages degenerated into lists of verbal devices, with little (though still some) attention paid to underlying structural principle. It is easy to see how these, and even their sixteenth-century successors, came to be despised. Yet they offer a clue to a most important and until recently neglected aspect of language, its intrinsic vitality, its creative autonomy. Language, by elaboration, by choice of purely verbal resource, independent of external control, can be conceived as in itself a work of art. How this can be involves difficult questions of the relation of the universe of discourse to non-linguistic universes, and these cannot be examined here. Neoclassicism introduced a literalism of discourse, which denied its creative autonomy, subduing language (as far as it could) to a narrowly descriptive function. Since such literal description was plainly inadequate to convey personal feeling, Romanticism emphasised the expressive element through the speaker’s or writer’s own self- criteria. Of course these have their places in traditional pre-Neoclassical writing, since most writing is a multiple- level activity, but accuracy and sincerity are only part of a general creative linguistic effort which allows other effects too, such as word-play, hyperbole, proverbial (not personal) wisdom. This general creative linguistic effort is what is denoted by a ‘rhetorical’, that is, traditional, way of writing. Failure to understand this underlies much modern misunder-standing of the Bible, Shakespeare, Chaucer. Our misun-derstanding may be partly excused by the lack of literary conceptualisation characteristic of traditional writers, and found even in the writers of technical rhetorical treatises, who were mostly men with a practical concern to teach the tricks of the trade. They were teaching how to generate verbal structures: ‘creative writing’, in fact. The treatises themselves were never intended as manuals of criticism or of the theory of literature, and hardly enter into the history of the criticism of Chaucer (though cf. Brathwait, No. 55). The notions about literature and language that underlie the treatises on rhetoric do however underlie critical commentary up to the middle of the sixteenth century, when Neoclassical ideas begin to enter. If we are sympathetic to these rhetorical, traditional and Gothic premises about literature we can learn a good deal about Chaucer’s poetry, English poetry and criticism, and the nature of literature itself.

  The very first comment on Chaucer, by the contemporary French poet, Deschamps, emphasises Chaucer’s variety. The warmest praise, if reiteration is any guide, is for Chaucer as a translator, and though there may be some French conceit in this, it accords well with the general medieval and indeed traditional sense, as implicit in medieval rhetoric, that a poet’s greatness consists in his ability specifically to find words for matter which is already provided. Deschamps’ praise of Chaucer as a man goes far beyond this, even taking hyperbole into account. Learned, scientific, good, practical, not too talkative: we are told that these were Chaucer’s personal characteristics, though seen in his writing as well. As a poet, Chaucer is compared with Ovid, the master of pathos, of love, of comedy and witty verbal elaboration. The comparison is profoundly apt, but never significantly realised in the full Neoclassical period even though Dryden sees it, as well as one or two others (Nos 66, 77, 99a). Though both Chaucer and Ovid are extraordinarily creative and both in various ways may be said to teach, neither laid claim to the poet’s sublime superiority of wisdom and morality over part of humanity, which the noble Neoclassical ideal of Sidney and Milton asserted.

  The comments of Usk (No. 2), and of others in the early period, do however refer to Chaucer’s serious and nourishing subject-matter, the ‘fructuous entendement’ (No. 7), that ‘sentence’, which the Gothic poet is certainly required to provide, as for example by the Host of the Tabard. But the Host also wants ‘solas’ or ‘mirth’. The Gothic poet besides his learning should provide variety; ‘some sad stories, some merry’, as the very Gothic Skelton remarks (No. 19).

  The fullest near-contemporary criticism of Chaucer is by Lydgate, who very frequently comments on, alludes to, and imitates Chaucer. Lydgate is not writing criticism in our sense, for reasons already explained, but from his remarks emerges an account of Chaucer’s poetry that deserves attention. After Chaucer’s personal genius and primacy as a poet, which Lydgate is rightly never tired of praising, Chaucer’s quality as a ‘noble rethor’ is for Lydgate most significant. Lydgate emphasises the richness of Chaucer’s language, ‘the gold dewdrops of rhetoric so fine’ (No. 4c, cf. 4b), his ‘sugared’ style, (the same word that Francis Meres used to praise his own contemporary Shakespeare’s Sonnets). Lydgate seems to register something of Chaucer’s realism of style, by his reference to ‘Word for word, with every circumstance’ (No. 4 e) but the concept of ‘flowers of rhetoric and eloquence’ (No. 4 d) is essentially that of the creative power of language, which rhetorical theory implies, and not the imitative dependence on some external factor which dominated views of poetry from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and which is characteristic of Neoclassical and Romantic views. Rhetorical theory, although it accepts the creative autonomy and thus elaboration of language, does not deny the validity of subject-matter, and Lydgate emphasises both the fullness of Chaucer’s subject-matter and, especially, its variety: fictions, ‘historial’ things, morality, disport, comedy, tragedy and ribaldry (No. 4 e). Lydgate gives an account of many of Chaucer’s works, but describes him as being particularly without a peer in his power to tell stories (No. 4 g). The status of poets, says Lydgate (owing something to Boccaccio here in his ‘Chapitle’ on poets (No.

  4 g)), is to be maintained by princes, and he is pleased that Chaucer in his life attained a ‘virtuous sufficiency’, but no claim is made for the poet’s supremacy as a man in society, for all his learning. Thus the outline of Chaucer the poet emerges, as one rich in linguistic resource, of a traditional kind, but in English an innovator; a story- and interested in writing many different kinds of works; learned, wise, prudent, modest, dependent, and genial even to the extent of being apparently uncritical. It seems a very satisfactory account, granted its broad outline, both of Chaucer himself, and of the Gothic ideal of a poet. The notion in Lydgate’s ‘Chapitle’ of the poet as a man leading a quiet life, needing the support of wine and his prince, may not fully correspond to the facts of Chaucer’s life as we know or guess them, but it corresponds quite closely (apart from the detail about wine) with the way Chaucer presents himself, and also of course with Lydgate’s own life. It will not be the only occasion when the ‘critic’ (if the term may be used so early as Lydgate) of Chaucer is found to describe himself. Such self-description does not necessarily invalidate the criticism. It is of the nature of great poets that they mirror many readers of different kinds; they are spokesmen for all or for many of us. The Gothic poet, in his variety and his activation of many different strands of tradition, from morality to ribaldry, is especially to be conceived of as a spokes-man for a culture, rather than its priest, prophet, or unacknowledged legislator.

  Subsequent comments by other men in the fifteenth century fill in the picture of the rhetorical Gothic poet, with further emphasis on ‘morality’, e.g. by Scogan (No. 5), while Walton (No. 6) appears to mention Chaucer the ‘flower of rhetoric’ and ‘excellent poet’ in order implicitly to contrast him with Gower’s ‘morality’ and to condemn his use of pagan morality.

  Chaucer’s social setting and possible contemporary references are reflected in Shirley’s gossipy remarks (No. 9), while on the other side Henryson (No. 11) is perceptively aware of the fictional inventiveness of Chaucer. A sense emerges from such contrasts, not only of the critic’s own interests and of the poet’s multiplicity, but also of the way that Chaucer’s poetry spans the range between pure fiction and actual historicity: it is not a self-enclosed fictional mirror set against a true ‘reality’, any more than it is simply documentary. Hence arises an ambivalence of ontological status very characteristic of Gothic poetry, and perhaps represented by the mingled collection of books once owned by Sir John Paston II (No. 12).

  After Lydgate, Caxton (No. 14) is Chaucer’s most copious commentator, reiterating the same general characteristics of rich language and pregnant meaning. The elaboration of rhetoric is seen not as empty flourishes, but as the delightful conveyance of solid nourishment, so that the as high among the poet’s achievements as the great poems. But Caxton also does full justice to the variety of ‘The Canterbury Tales’, and displays a laudable anxiety—which seems not to have extended to his actual practice—to get the text accurate. (7) Hawes (No. 18) once again strikes familiar notes, employing the useful word ‘sententious’ (specifically of ‘The House of Fame’) which describes that rhetorical Gothic rich verbalisation of an accepted tradition characteristic of so much of the poetry of Chaucer as of Shakespeare, but which was rejected by Neoclassical theory and practice.

  There are some aspects of Gothic poetry which are easily assimilated to Neoclassicism: moralising is one; another is ‘realism’. Realism, which is certainly present in Chaucer’s poetry, is touched lightly on by Lydgate, as already noted, and occasionally picked up elsewhere, as in the anonymous comment of c. 1477 (No. 13). Humour is traditionally related to realism through satire, as in Chaucer’s poetry itself, but though it is clear enough that Lydgate, for example, greatly appreciated Chaucer’s humour, it is not much commented on in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Skelton (No. 19), for all his New Learning a very Gothic poet, responds to it most vigorously, as we might expect from his own works.

  Skelton also seems to be the first to feel the need to defend Chaucer’s language; and the passage of time, making Chaucer ‘an ancient’, for good and bad, begins to be felt. Furthermore, the sixteenth century sees the steady rise of the tide of Humanism. Gavin Douglas condemns Chaucer’s ‘lakar’ (faulty) style (No. 20) in translating Virgil in an insufficiently Virgilian way—a true enough judgment, if somewhat beside the point. Sir Brian Tuke, in his dedication (No. 22) to Thynne’s edition of ‘The Workes of Geffray Chaucer’, on the other hand, reveals how the Humanist inspiration received from the great literary achievements of Classical Antiquity could lead not only to veneration of Chaucer and a higher valuation of the importance of literature in itself, but also to the practical achievements of scholarship and the first edition of the complete works of Chaucer by Thynne in 1532. Scholarship is a product of Neoclassicism rather than of the multiple, fluid, casual, Gothic spirit. But Tuke is also the first to express a characteristic Humanist, anti- medieval, surprise that so good a poet as Chaucer could exist as it were against the cultural climate, in so barbarous a time ‘when all good letters were laid asleep throughout the world’. Sidney echoes this in a memorable phrase (No. 43). conviction from the immense zeal of Protestant reform, though the case of Erasmus shows that Humanism need not necessarily go with Protestantism. At first Protestant zeal took over one aspect of medieval Latin official culture in comdemning literature for being fiction, and fiction for being in itself reprehensible; and contrasted Chaucer’s works (especially ‘The Canterbury Tales’) un-favourably with the Bible (Nos 21, 23, 31). But the literary perception of Ascham, severe moralist though he was, marks a more subtle appreciation, and an assimilation of Chaucer’s works to the status of the Classics. The literary prominence of the men of St John’s College, Cambridge, around the end of the sixteenth century, with their numerous comments on Chaucer, may reflect the influence of Ascham, or at least of his type of Humanism. In the later seventeenth century and the eighteenth the Protestant interest in Chaucer lapsed, as he was seen primarily as a humorist, to return with vigour in the nineteenth century (cf. No. 99). (8)

  Humanism was the main force that transformed Chaucer criticism by introducing those Neoclassical concepts of literature and of the superior status of the poet that help to disclose, as well as to develop, a new feeling, beginning in the sixteenth century, about our experience of the world, and of the relation of language (and hence literature) to the world. Although there are important adumbrations, the significant text in English is Sidney’s ‘An Apology’, where the reference to Chaucer is significantly brief (No. 43). Sidney’s genius creamed off the long labours of many brilliant European scholars and critics, to offer England for the first time in English a coherent theory of literature. (9) ‘An Apology’ is only casually and incidentally ‘criticism’. But ‘criticism’ is often taken to be Sidney’s principal aim, and in consequence ‘An Apology’ has been often misunderstood, and undervalued, by readers looking primarily for critical ‘insights’, rather than a theory of literature. Nevertheless, some of Sidney’s critical ‘insights’, or judgments, usefully point to the nature of what he was looking for in literature. Of these judgments his remarks on drama are the most striking, for there, as is well known, he categorically condemns that current English drama, developed from medieval sources, that Shakespeare was to write—the English language’s supreme achievement. Why should Sidney have been so wrong?

  The reason is that he was applying the wrong literary principles, or at least principles different from those hitherto accepted. Perhaps Sidney, had he lived to see or genius as an empirical fact, as did Ben Jonson; but again like Jonson, he might well have reiterated his criticisms. Sidney’s Neoclassical doctrine required in the drama obedience to the celebrated pseudo-Aristotelian three unities of time, place and action. Well-known as these are, their underlying significance is often not recognised. It consists in the attempt to make the presentation of the events of the play apparently identical with the way things appear to happen in life, but in a self-enclosed, self- consistent, completed fiction. Thus a fundamentally mimetic theory of literature is being invoked by Sidney for the first time in the vernacular English tradition. Ben Jonson’s implicit criticisms of Shakespeare in the various Prologues to his plays apply the same theory. Jonson explains that his own plays do not cover a person’s lifetime, i.e. they do not represent time symbolically, nor violate time-keeping; as with time, so other aspects of ‘reality’, such as war, are not, he boasts, given purely token or symbolic, verbal, representation: ‘three rusty swords,/And help of some few foot-and-halfe-foote-words’ (Prologue to ‘Every Man in his Humour’, with which Neoclassical Jonson begins his collected ‘Works’ (1640).) Gothic Shakespeare never bothered to collect and publish his own plays. The status of the poet (and Jonson calls himself poet, not playwright) is claimed to be different. Jonson specifically claims an authoritative, edifying and improving function for himself as poet. To quote Sidney again, the ‘poet’s nobleness’ ( ed. cit., p. 104) can never, by definition, create mockery, indecency, or the grotesque; that is, such abuse as infects the fancy with unworthy objects (p. 125) or as, ‘in the comical part of our tragedy’, the ‘scurrility, unworthy of any chaste ears’ (p. 136). Thus the Neoclassical true poet will never be in such a position that he will need to ‘revoke’ as Chaucer did, in the name of the official culture, the larger proportion of his works. The Neoclassical poet is not only better than other men, he is more learned: ‘of all sciences (I speak still of human, and according to the human conceits) is our poet the monarch’ (p. 113). There is here a glance at the supremacy of religious truth, but Sidney effectively assumes an identity of interest and conviction between poet and theologian or preacher, for ‘ever-praiseworthy Poesy is full of virtue-breeding delightfulness’ (p. 141).

  Yet ‘Poesy is an art of imitation’ (p. 101), and Sidney’s whole theory, like that of the great European scholars on whom he drew, is based on this premise. Thus in the Neoclassical view poetry is by definition both monarch of realistic representation, of learning, and of morality, whose very humour has no need of laughter (which ‘hath only a scornful tickling’ ( ed. cit., p. 136)). It is hard to fit Chaucer, or Shakespeare, into such a frame. Yet so powerful and seductive is the Neoclassical doctrine that Dr Jonson in the eighteenth century, whose empirical contemplation of Shakespeare forced him to reject the doctrine of the necessity of the three unities in a play, because Shakespeare who violated them was so successful, was still impelled to maintain (No. 79) that the graces of a play are ‘to copy Nature and instruct life’; that is, the aim is to be ‘realistic’ and didactic at the same time. Such an aim is often self-contradictory, for Nature is by no means always edifying. Yet Neoclassicism is irremediably committed to an essentially didactic view of literature, which involves also the superiority of poetry, as Sidney claims, over history and philosophy, and the superiority of the poet over everyone else. ‘A good book is the life-blood of a master-spirit’, says Milton who also maintains the (alas) extraordinary notion that good poets are ipso facto good men. Both Samuel Johnson and Shelley describe poets, in Shelley’s famous final phrase in his ‘Defence’, as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of mankind’. It is not surprising that Shelley has nothing to say of Chaucer. Neoclassical subsumes Romantic in this as in several other matters. The poet is no ordinary man, he is ‘a curious universal scholar’, as Gabriel Harvey was to call him, simultaneously a law-giver, priest and prophet; vates, as even so early as 1556 Chaucer was described on his tomb (cf. Foxe, No. 36).

  Thus Chaucer in the sixteenth century can only be represented as a moral teacher, by those who approve of him (and not all do), by emphasising his moral elements and disregarding both his ‘mirth’ and his modesty, in contrast with the less unified, more miscellaneous, Gothic view, in accordance with which Chaucer, Langland, Gower, the ‘Pearl’ -poet, Deschamps, Machaut, Boccaccio, Dante, all present themselves in their own poems as ignorant, and sometimes foolish or absurd learners. Those who disapprove of Chaucer in the sixteenth century can, on the other hand, like Harington (No. 49) or the early Protestants, condemn him for his undignified or unedifying aspects, his modesty and ‘mirth’, which is to disregard the equally Gothic traditional moralising and morality also fully present in Chaucer’s work, and frequently noted in the sixteenth century.

  Sidney resolves his Neoclassical dilemma between ‘following Nature’ and ‘instructing life’ by stipulating Nature, different from the tarnished brass of ordinary experience; and the poet himself must be a ‘better teacher than Aquinas’, as Milton was to call Spenser, not just a genius with words. Indeed, words tend to become suspect or unimportant, in the seventeenth century, and regarded as mere labels to things; often misleading labels.

  This last point, about the status of words, introduces the final element in the critical developments of the seventeenth century, which owed much to the influence of Bacon. There was a shift in the general sense of the relationship of ‘words’ to ‘things’. It is clear that the development of scientific empiricism, the ‘mechanical philosophy’, accompanied or helped to cause, or was partly caused by, a distrust of the intangible, irremediable vagueness of language. (10) The metaphorical nature of language was attacked, for example, by Hobbes. Sprat’s famous account in his ‘History of the Royal Society’, 1667, of the Royal Society’s ideal of a ‘close, naked and natural way of speaking’, by which, as in primitive times, men might deliver ‘so many things, almost in an equal number of words’, represented a determined down-grading of language as itself autonomous and creative (No. 61). Instead of thinking of language as taking its proper origin and validity from the mind, as being a communication between minds, language was thought of as validated by its correspondence with ‘external’, ‘objective’ reality, which comes to be thought of increasingly as primarily material. (11) The demand was for language to reject metaphor and abstraction and to become more literalistic. This is essentially a ‘mimetic’ theory of language, which obviously chimed with the mimetic or naturalistic basis of more specifically Neoclassical literary principle. As with Neoclassical ‘naturalism’, linguistic ‘realism’, or literalism, was at that time limited by certain social, moral and religious constraints, by the conservatism which preserved older ways of thought and feeling, and by the ordinary human situation. The importance of the change, however, may be measured by the fact that in the twentieth century we often retain the didactic naturalism in literature and in behaviour that is derived from Neoclassical theory, even though we have cast off the traditional restraints. (12)

  However, in Sidney and in the seventeenth century, traditional moral and social constraints accompanied literary theory. When combined with the desire for edification and for consistency in literary works they led to the notion of ‘decorum’ (which, as Milton says, ‘is the grand masterpiece’), meaning an avoidance of the different kinds of material or attitude in the same work of art, such as allowed, in Shakespeare, comic scenes in tragedies; or, in Chaucer, a tasteless mixture of the indecent with the devout, the flippant with the serious, ‘sad stories with some merry’. Neoclassical literary criticism is firmly based on a theory of the clearly separate genres of literature, to which it is very hard to adapt the actual practice of Chaucer and other Gothic writers (or indeed of much literature of other periods, though that is a different question). (13) In England we may see the clash between Gothic and Neoclassical principle played out before our eyes around 1600 by the juxtaposition and contrast between Shakespeare, our last and greatest Gothic writer, and Ben Jonson, our first great Neoclassical writer.